Letters to the Editor

Aug. 25, 2017

Mrs. Roebling’s Bridge?

To the Editor:

Joseph Alexiou wrote a warm and engaging review of my book, “Chief Engineer” (Aug. 13). Yet one of his statements raises a point with implications far beyond the details of Washington and Emily Roebling’s lives. He writes that Washington’s illness during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge meant that he left his wife “in charge of completing the great bridge.” This is not a conclusion that can be drawn from the pages of “Chief Engineer.” Although badly affected by decompression sickness, Washington Roebling was always in command of the work. Emily Roebling’s role in assisting her husband was a crucial one: There is no doubt that she was extremely well acquainted both with the technical details and the political matters that ensured the completion of the bridge. Washington would always acknowledge how important her contribution had been. There is, however, no evidence to support the claim that Emily Roebling completed the bridge. We are obliged to look as hard as we can for evidence that supports what we wish to believe. If we don’t find such evidence, we must abandon our faith in the tale, however attractive it might once have seemed.

Erica Wagner London

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Me Time

To the Editor:

In reference to the Help Desk column, by Judith Newman (Aug. 13): Parents may be flattered by what she reports as Josh Shipp’s most important premise: “No matter how your child behaves, his or her biggest concern is not being able to spend time with you.” But, as a former child, I find it dismayingly typical of the one-size-fits-all simplistic thinking that often infests discussions of child-rearing. My biggest childhood concerns involved looks, intelligence and popularity. I don’t recall ever being concerned about not being able to spend time with my parents.

Felicia Nimue Ackerman Providence, R.I.

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Not British!

To the Editor:

The subheading on Eric Bennett’s review of “The World Broke in Two” (Aug. 13) refers to T. S. Eliot as one of “four British writers.” But Eliot’s friend Virginia Woolf, also a focus of Bill Goldstein’s book, said Eliot acted the perfect English gentleman far too much to be taken for a real Englishman. Although he became a British subject, “Old Possum” was discovered by an American, Ezra Pound, who edited “The Wasteland.” In fact, as Lyndall Gordon’s biography has shown, Eliot was deeply formed by his long and illustrious New England ancestry.

Steve France Cabin John, Md.

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War Poetry

To the Editor:

Arguing the need for authenticity, David Orr (On Poetry, Aug. 6) contends that when writing about war, poets “have to worry about genuineness in a way that they may not when writing about, for instance, sex.” But might one argue that writing about sex (or not having it) is not very different from writing about war (or not fighting it)? In a groundbreaking 1993 study, Margaret Bose points out that in his early modern poetics of love, Petrarch himself writes a war-inciting poem, castigating the crude Germans across the Alps in contrast to the glorified Italians. We may ask how connected the militarist mind-set of war poetry is to its (seeming) opposite: the obsessive heart-throbbing of love poetry. How embedded in our culture is the presence of what Orr calls “a kind of nothingness that haunts war poetry”? Isn’t the glorification of one kind of, usually resistant, beloved fundamentally tied to the denigration of a sometimes shifting but similarly necessary enemy?